Voltaire plays with the heart

If Voltaire did not exist, it would be necessary for the devil to invent him. Like Jhonen Vasquez before him, Voltaire mines a dark and deadpan humor, his needling lyrics and coughing voice adrip with ichor, and does it so completely that he is no longer just a spectator to the scenes he describes, but a depraved participant, ecstatic.

I first heard Voltaire as a freshman in high school. A friend of mine, a high nerd, came rushing in with The Devil’s Bris pinched tightly in his thin pink fingers. This, he declared, is the most amazingly disturbed album I’ve ever heard. And then he put it on.

Please, kill that man upstairs.
if you ever loved me, you’ll do this one thing,
won’t you sweetheart?

The truth of it is that it’s not, not really then, certainly not now. But as a freshman in high school, in the first season of South Park, right before Eminem became obsessed with introductions, Voltaire’s cheery insanity was both unsettling and hypnotic, a high court quartet singing traitor’s tales.

Voltaire himself calls it: “Music for a parallel universe where electricity was never invented and Morrissey is the queen of England.”

Which is really quite grim if you think about it.

Fortunately, he flits about in this dimension instead of the one where the position of President of the United States is simply called “Boss” because Bruce Springsteen has held it for so long, and he”s here tonight at El Corazon. Wear your pentabling and whatever charms you feel appropriate and hie thee hither.